Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

It takes an age before Johnny Depp shows his face in Pirates the Third, and when he does, it's the tip of his nose that looms into screen left, eventually succeeded by a flaring nostril. I doubt there's been a larger, longer close up of a proboscis this side of Seabiscuit. There's no rhyme or reason for it, really, but our indulgence is rewarded when not one, not two, but an entire crew of digital Johnnies hive into view, flouncing and flailing for all they are worth. One even lays an egg.

Captain Jack Sparrow, you may recall, bought a one-way ticket to Davy Jones's locker when he went down with his ship at the end of Dead Man's Chest. Not that death is a terminal condition in this series; before it's through, most of the cast will have perished at least once and returned to the fray. For Sparrow, perdition is to be marooned on the Black Pearl in the middle of a desert without a whisper of a breeze. The doldrums. It's enough to drive a buccaneer to distraction.

And he's not the only one. The entire franchise seems on the verge of collapse, propelled to construct ever more grandiose flights of fancy. Without them, there would be nothing there - but a movie cannot exist on rollick alone (not by the second sequel anyway). I kept flashing to the image of a doomed mariner furiously bailing out his boat as it sinks inexorably beneath the waves.

The problem is not so much that the energy - or the invention - flags; but the audience may. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio have been working overtime. Having fabricated an entire supernatural pirate mythology from odds and ends (a theme park here, a Flying Dutchman there), they now feel duty bound to lay it all out for us as they go.

Buena Vista has requested that critics refrain from spoilers, but this whole movie is one long (two and three quarter hour), arcane, monstrously convoluted spoiler. And the more that is explained, the murkier everything gets. World's End features so many detailed negotiations between charlatans with obscure cross-purposes you head for the exit more confused than when you went in.

It's all as splashy as $250 million can buy, and on occasion the CGI guys conjure something akin to poetry: a sampan gliding through a vast arctic cave, then emerging like a space ship into an inky black sea reflecting the stars above ("You have to be lost to find a place that's never been found," rationalizes Barbossa). Or the Black Pearl surfing through the sand on the back of a million crustaceans; the climactic sea battle on the cusp of an oceanic whirlpool. We critics routinely shortchange such wonders, but blockbusters thrive on spectacle, and any movie that can produce a 50-foot woman almost as an afterthought has no worries on that score.

At the same time, it's easier to warm to the vaudevillian Bob Hope and Bing Crosby comedy director Gore Verbinski keeps trying to smuggle in under the radar, in dozens of throwaway sight gags, madcap verbal non-sequiturs, and slapstick set-pieces. Mr Depp is his principal ally, of course, the agent of chaos swanning his way through the heart of the whole shebang. It's really too bad this anarchic element is swamped by the movie's noisy inconsequence. Fully an hour too long and emotionally frigid, Pirates is scuppered by nothing so much as its own inflated self-importance. This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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